


in the family of things

by iimpavid



Series: Peter Nureyev's Alias Catalog [8]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Alternate Universe, Friendship, Future Fic, Grieving, M/M, intergalactic travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:07:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24153316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid
Summary: “You brought flowers for the lady,” she reminded him.
Relationships: Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel
Series: Peter Nureyev's Alias Catalog [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1716670
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	in the family of things

**Author's Note:**

> A repost of an older fic because my good friends reminded me that having OCs interact with canon characters is Good and Okay, Actually. Dora and Peter are each other's beards in Europan high society don't stress about it.

Ysadora Melva stood backlit against the setting sun.

She imagined she cut quite the figure, standing on the concrete rooftop of some skyscraper in some Earth city whose name she couldn’t remember. It had spent a very long time rebuilding from its own ashes. Her shadow stretched far ahead of her, proportions skewed into unnatural spindles that spilled off the tinted glass roof’s far edge— right beside where her best friend in the entire galaxy sat.

With his back to her he looked almost healthy. The man she knew as her bumbling, convenient husband Alfred (or her vicious bodyguard Callyx, depending on the state of his facial hair). He sat watching traffic flit by on the hoverway, cars’ hulls refracting sunlight almost too bright to stand without sunglasses. Every once in a while he would turn in profile and she could see the angles of his jaw and cheek a were little too pronounced but she could see that his makeup was flawless. A bottle of champagne sat at his elbow, unopened.

He didn’t flinch or look toward her as she sat down beside him.

The updraft caught her hair, whipping it into snarls. Dora was glad for having chosen t-strap heels. Dangling off a hundred stories, it felt like the planet was tugging her down by the soles of her feet. Beside her, Peter was already missing one of his pumps with one bare foot swinging above the drop. 

_Peter_.

That was something she’d learned over the course of the last year: his name. 

* * *

The first place he went after that day, with Juno Steel's blood drying in palm print streaks down his silk blouse, was Brahma. 

She remembered springing him from Brahman military custody. They took their military prisons for political dissidents very seriously on Brahma. Her personal militia had had to kill many people. This was the single most-difficult heist she’d ever executed. The _only_ one, if anyone were keeping track. Usually she had people she paid to take care of these kinds of endeavors. 

“ _Most-wanted terrorist in modern history_ is quite the title to earn at 17. You should have done more with it, darling.” She stood outside his maximum cell in her stolen officer’s uniform with her hands on her hips. “Why did you come back here?” 

“Surveillance is still running, _captain_.” The flicker of his eyes to the glittering pips on her breast were her only indication that he saw her-- before his eyes lost focus again. The arrest had broken his glasses and it wasn’t worth the headache to try to focus.

“It is… but not for long.” 

As if on cue her hard-won EMP went off and the entire prison went dark. The deep red emergency lights only flickered on for a moment before the second blast took out the generator. The electrical field around Peter’s cell vanished. His magnetic shackles dropped from his body like dead snakes.

He sat unmoving.

She stomped over to him. Military boots were good for stomping. She understood why Callyx liked them so much more than heels. She pulled him up from the floor by the shoulders of his prison jumpsuit. “We have five minutes to get you dressed and out of here you silly man, let’s go.” 

“Dora, _no—_ ” 

“Dora, _yes_ ,” she retorted and, giving in to panic, slapped him. “You’re not going to stay here and be executed by anyone for _anything_. I don’t give a shit what you’ve done or think you deserve right now. You’re coming with me.”

It should have perturbed her that he let himself be led, his prison-issue slippers shuffling against the tile. It wasn’t like him to be so quiet. She should have expected it.

Of course, the moment they broke out of Brahma’s gravity he drugged her and jettisoned her off her own ship in an escape pod. She should have expected that, too. Such was the nature of friendship. 

* * *

Their mutual silence above the drifting city only lasted as long as Peter’s patience: “Can’t you take a hint?”

He’d gotten so damn rude over the last year. 

“That depends on what’s being hinted at, cara mia,” she purred, her words growing sibilant and warm as her Europan accent crept in. There was no need to stand on pretense up here with just the two of them.

It did nothing to improve his mood. He scoffed at her, “Do you _ever_ stop? Is relentless antagonism your new trademark?”

“If you’re referring to my refusal to stop following my grieving and suicidal best friend, no, I don’t ever stop. I won’t. I refuse to.” 

“I’m not suicidal, Dora.” 

“It doesn’t look that way from where I’m standing. Sitting. Metaphorically-standing.” 

He turned to her with an inscrutable expression. 

She hadn’t had the luxury of looking at him for so long that he seemed like a different person. The intense gravity of the planet didn’t seem to affect him at all. His posture was perfect. He’d gotten thinner. Weariness was written into every line of his face— and there were so many more of them now. White streaked through his hair from the temples back. 

She wanted, more than anything, to reach out and touch him. Pull him into her arms and never, ever let go, because here was her best friend in so much pain he’d tried to bury it alive. But if she did... she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to catch up with again. 

“Champagne?” He held the bottle out to her.

“I never turn down a free drink.” She opened it with minimal drama, easing the cork free with a steady grip. Her manicure belied the strength of her hands.

The sounds of traffic seemed miles away. They drank. Distant sirens wailed. Somewhere, many floors below them, a party carried on without so much as noticing their absence.

“I don’t know how to explain myself,” Peter said.

“You don’t have to.”

He made a disbelieving noise around another mouthful of champagne.

“You never have to explain yourself to me. Certainly not about this.”

“You say that like I’m actually your husband.” 

“You are.” 

“We’ve been married thirty years and you never knew my name.” 

“As if that matters. As if this arrangement was only for _my_ convenience-- the Melva inheritance has bought you plenty of friends,” she reminded him, “Not that any of that matters. You’re the friend of my heart, Peter. My _wife_ even tolerates you. You'll never be rid of me.” 

“So you’re content to just let me run away for as long as I like?” 

“That’s not what I said. You can’t run forever; but you don’t have to be alone when you stop.” 

She extended a hand to take the bottle back from him— Peter made eye contact with her then dropped it off the roof to the skyscraper. The sound of its shattering on a lower tier of the building was swallowed up in the rush of wind. 

Dora didn’t watch it fall. “Be petulant all you want, I’m not going to go away, and if you leave, I’m going to follow you again.” 

“For how long?”

“For as long as it takes.” 

“And what if I went back to Mars?” 

“Then _we_ would go back to Mars. I wouldn’t mind the lower gravity, personally. It’s kinder on the joints.” 

* * *

Hyperion City Cemetery was a vast, dusty plain in its own atmospheric dome half an hour’s drive outside the city proper. 

Grave markers jutted out of the desert expanse in neat rows, some of them shaded by pinyons or sparse devil grass. Those who couldn’t afford a plot all their own were on the far side. Mausoleums-- stacked full of tidy rows of small-boxed bones with shared altars-- stood on the crest of the the one hill. Gnarled pinyons grew around this, too, a copse of them. They made a suitable windbreak for the wealthier dead below.

Peter and Dora stood outside it for a long time. They had dressed for the occasion at Dora’s insistence, _You’ll feel better if you dress the part,_ she promised him— an echo of his own words, repeated often over the course of his career to new thieves and cons just beginning to hone their skills. 

In his black on black suit, gloves, and mourning veil, Peter decided he didn’t feel any better at all.

“I can’t do this.” 

They were the first words to come out of his mouth since they’d landed on Mars.

Dora stood beside him and waited for him to find his resolve. She held the bouquet. It was a mass of blood-red roses, which Peter had spent their lunch date de-thorning, punctuated with gigantic, star-pale lilies and tied with ribbon. Their combined smell was overwhelming despite the thin Martian air.

“I can’t,” he repeated. “I just… can’t.” 

“Then you don’t have to; we can go back to the hotel. _He’s_ not going anywhere.” 

A bewildered pause fell. Then Peter made a disgusted noise and started walking away from her… and toward the mausoleum entrance. “I can’t believe you would say something like that— that you would be so, so insensitive, so flippant--“ 

“I got you walking, didn’t I?” 

“... I’m not going to dignify that with a response. It'll only encourage you.” 

They walked the slender rows scanning names and nearly walked past it. After all, there were ranks even in a pauper’s grave, some easier to overlook than others, and the Steel family was in the bottom row the middle of a middle aisle.

“They put him between his mother and brother,” Peter told her, sounding distant. “I couldn’t have picked a better arrangement.” 

Then he dropped like his strings had been cut. The aisle was narrow— how they got coffins in and out of the walls Ysadora couldn’t guess— and Peter didn’t seem to feel the impact he made against the dead stacked behind him as he slid to the floor. His veil slipped off.

Dora knelt beside him. “Peter—“ 

“ _Don’t touch me_.” He said it like it hurt him to breathe. 

Dora, wisely, didn’t touch him.

Peter’s shoulders convulsed. He stripped off his gloves. Reached a hand toward the inscription—

_Juno Steel, Private Eye_

_Beloved Friend & Boss _

_Gone But Not Forgotten_

— and withdrew it before he could touch the cold stone.

Engraved in marble in commanding font it was horribly permanent. 

If the conditions were right it would outlast civilizations. Juno’s grave would become an artifact of Martian history to be discovered in some far flung future, then analyzed… displayed… bought, sold -- stolen.

He clamped a hand over his mouth to smother the sound he made: a pained moan that seemed to rise from his toes and fill every inch of him. 

There wasn’t a single thought in his head, only the feeling of being aware, all at once without a single thought for decency, that something he needed very badly had gone missing. It was one thing to be missing a vital clue or a weapon or ransom money— he had talked himself out of so many situations where that single missing piece could have cost him his life.

But Juno Steel was dead.

Even Peter Nureyev couldn’t negotiate with that.

He curled in on himself. He sobbed and shook and looked again and again at the reality that Juno was dead— until he thought his chest would unspool. Everything left that made him, there was hardly anything left now, would come undone and be set adrift forever.

* * *

Of course, that didn’t happen.

When he could feel himself breathing again— hair damp with sweat, aching and swollen eyes, dry and fuzzy tongue, coughing and gagging on mucus at intervals— he hadn’t unraveled at all. That would have been too easy.

Peter blinked and blinked and blinked until he realized his eyes were focusing well enough, his glasses were just smeared with tears and skin oil and slowly-drying salt. He took them off. He breathed unevenly— through his mouth because he was never going to be able to breathe through his nose ever again. His face felt terribly hot but fom the neck down he was freezing, long limbs still seized by bouts of uncontrolled trembling.

Then there were flowers in front of him. Dora shoved them into his lap like that was just something a person did. He looked at her, completely lost.

“You brought flowers for the lady,” she reminded him. He couldn’t make out her features but from the sound of her voice, she’d been crying, too.

Careful with his shaky hands, he pressed his face into them. Red and white petals soft enough to sleep on and so fresh he could smell them even with his sinuses so congested he could hardly breathe.

He laid them just in front of Juno’s grave and fussed over the fall of the tissue they were wrapped in, the angle of the bow tied around them, which blooms were faced just so, until there wasn’t anything else he could see to fix. He knelt there, sniffling occasionally, rubbing absently at his eyes which had begun to itch from the pollen and the crying. 

Finally, because his legs were starting to cramp and he couldn’t remember how to stand or move. He told Dora, “I don’t want to leave him.” 

“You don’t have to, we can stay right here. He’s not going anywhere.” She was scared he would start crying again— but his center held and he gave a watery laugh instead.

“No, I guess he isn’t.” 

Red-faced and hurting, he leaned back again to rub his face clean with the black handkerchief he’d brought along. He managed to get the worst of the makeup streaked beneath and around his eyes— he wouldn’t notice the black that had dripped and dried down his cheeks and been smeared into his hairline until later.

“Yes, alright,” he said to himself, not taking his eyes off Juno’s grave, “I can’t stay here forever.” 

Dora helped him up. Their groans filled the empty crypt, stiff muscles and joints popping as they coaxed their bodies back to something resembling standing. Sometime in the course of the thirty years they had been friends, they’d both gone and gotten old.

Dora offered Peter his veil.

He took it, hand steady, “Do I really look that terrible?” 

“You do,” she nodded, “and there’s a wind storm coming, so you’re gonna want it. I saw on the news this morning.” 

Peter scoffed and pulled her into a rib-aching hug. “Only you would pay attention to the weather in these circumstances.” 

“One of us must.” 

She held him and stood there with him until he could stand to breathe on his own again.

**Author's Note:**

> Leave me a comment with your favorite line.
> 
> Some additional facts to really just twist the knife: 
> 
> 1) Rita nearly tore her hair out trying to come up with Juno's epitaph so Mick helped her out.
> 
> 2)Mick Mercury, who for some godawful and terrible reason outlived Juno Steel, wrote what got written on Juno's headstone.
> 
> 3) I don't know how Juno died for certain but I'm reasonably confident it was the direct result of something Peter did or failed to do.
> 
> 4) The one copy of Juno's death plan they could find specifically requested his burial location
> 
> 5) Peter has shot at Buddy several times over the course of his year refusing to face reality and landed a couple of them, too. She's persistent.
> 
> 6) Attendance to Juno's funeral was astronomically high, even among those people who supposedly hate him. It was front page news for days.


End file.
